contemporary classical
Gavin Dixon
The Paris-based Ensemble InterContemporain brought a wide-ranging programme to the Wigmore Hall. They are known as new music specialists – the group was founded by Pierre Boulez as the house band for the IRCAM electronic music studio – so Ravel and Debussy are early music for them. In fact, those venerable names were included to give context to more recent French and Italian compositions. Leading mid-century modernists were also included – Messiaen, Maderna and Berio – but the real substance was provided by two living composers, Philippe Schoeller and Matteo Franceschini, both offering Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Thomas Adès and the Britten Sinfonia here reached the most revolutionary works in their twin portrait season of Gerald Barry and Beethoven: Barry’s Chevaux-de-frise and Beethoven’s "Eroica". Adès, ever-keen to play the iconoclast, emphasised all the radical features and brought a visceral intensity to both scores. The Barry came off best, the performance yet again demonstrating the close artistic affinity between the two composers. The Beethoven was less successful – suitably dynamic but with its lyrical lines rarely given space to breath under the weight of Adès’ muscular interventions. Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Thomas Adès and the Britten Sinfonia are embarking on a three-year project, coupling the symphonies of Beethoven with works by contemporary Irish composer Gerald Barry. Adès is keen to highlight the radical vision of the two composers, so expect stark juxtapositions and uncompromising readings. The project began on a more modest scale, however, with this recital of chamber works, given excellent performances and full of intriguing surprises.Opening the cycle with Beethoven’s Septet, Op. 20, suggests a path from the conventional to the revolutionary. But this early, elegant and classically Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Until yesterday my only experience of the Welsh language in the opera house was a few isolated passages in Iain Bell’s In Parenthesis last year and the surtitles WNO routinely put up alongside the English in the Millennium Centre. Now Guto Puw, a 46-year-old composer from north Wales, has written an entire opera for Music Theatre Wales and the Carmarthen-based Theatr Genedlaethol in this beautiful language of which I’m ashamed to say I know not a single word apart from a handful of road signs and the unexpected pepperings of English (“Electric – Price – Bloody Job” was one whole phrase I Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Joubert: Jane Eyre April Frederick, David Stout, English Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Woods (Somm)This is the second Brontë opera to have come my way in the past year; Carlisle Floyd’s Wuthering Heights is now joined by this involving adaptation of Jane Eyre, composed between 1987 and 1997 by John Joubert, born in South Africa but a British resident since 1946. He's still musically active, and this live recording was made at a performance given in Birmingham last October, now released to celebrate Joubert’s 90th birthday. An extended interview included as a bonus on the second disc is Read more ...
David Kettle
Has Glasgow’s Tectonics weekend turned away from its wilder excess? Has it, in its fifth outing, even – well, grown up and got serious? That was partly the sense from the opening day of conductor Ilan Volkov’s visionary mix of contemporary classical, rock, folk, jazz, electronica, and all the uncategorisable hinterlands in between them, a concept that he kicked off in Reykjavík and which he’s now delivered all over the globe. In Glasgow’s previous offerings, we’ve had works directed from a kids’ sandpit, foley artists making music from scrunching packets of dried pasta and flicking through Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The first solo album in eight years from legendary musical innovator Ryuichi Sakamoto resonates with misfire and melancholy - unsurprisingly, when much of that time has been dedicated to a battle against throat cancer. The organ, Bachian fugues, and a series of portentous narrations join a more familiar blend of dissonant and percussive tracks which, like the title “async”, blend a pervasive sense of an organism malfunctioning with a contemplative attitude to mortality and mutability. Even for a composer already known to span a giddy generic spectrum from Iggy Pop to John Cage, this is a Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
For most pianists, playing the Ligeti Piano Concerto would be enough exertion for one night, to be followed by a stiff drink and some down time. Not for the tireless Shai Wosner at Kings Place last night. By the time the Ligeti came along, not only had he already played a Mozart concerto, he then went on to appear in every remaining item in the programme. It was exhausting just to watch – but also exhilarating.This concert was the latest instalment of Aurora Orchestra’s five-year survey of all the Mozart piano concertos, in roughly chronological order. The accompanying programming is Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain was a work of political protest when it premiered in 2000, in 2017 it’s a piece that reads more like a commentary – a disturbing musical documentary that captures nearly 20 years of escalating European tensions, suspicions and right-wing extremism. As harmonic consensus gave way last night to chattering confusion, musical certainty to a distorted multiplicity of possibilities, abstraction has rarely felt more pointed, more horribly specific.But Haas’s most famous work brings its own baggage. Hailed internationally as a contemporary masterpiece and championed Read more ...
Robert Beale
The world premiere of a symphony by a British composer – Huw Watkins – was the chief attraction in the latest Hallé programme with Sir Mark Elder at the Bridgewater Hall. The other music on the programme, however, held interest and indeed created a foil to Watkins’ work.But first to his Symphony. Anyone looking for a contribution to a perceived “tradition” of British symphony writing would be hard put to place this one. It is of itself: one of a kind. Granted, it’s written for a fairly conventional large orchestra, but with nothing to frighten the horses in sound effect terms. Watkins can Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A new opera from Peter Eötvös is a major event. More than any other composer today, he has the ability to create sophisticated contemporary music that supports and enriches sung drama. This concert presented the UK premiere of his Senza sangue, a short, one-act work for just two singers and orchestra. It proved an ideal vehicle of the composer’s unique talents, and the work was given an excellent performance by conductor Simone Young and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.Eötvös himself is also a conductor, and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle is central to his repertoire. Senza sangue is intended as a Read more ...
David Kettle
March 2017 is MacMillan month in Scotland – well, in Glasgow at least, with certain events spilling over into Edinburgh and other cities too. It’s not as if we don’t already get to hear quite a bit of Sir James’s music north of the border, but it’s a valuable celebration all the same, and one that also serves to bring together several of the nation’s musical institutions – the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, among others – at what’s a particularly prolific time in his career.And what better way to kick off the event than with a Read more ...